Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/263

241 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 241 Ionians (before they had obtained any papyrus from Egypt), wrote down their unpolished wisdom upon sheep-skins.* But his prose is only so far prose that it has cast off the fetters of verse, and not because it expresses the ideas of the writer in a simple and perspicuous manner. His book began thus : "Zeus and Time (Chronos), and Chthonia ex- isted from eternity. Chthonia was called Earth (yjjf), since Zeus endowed her with honour." Pherecydes next relates how Zeus trans- formed himself into Eros, the god of love, wishing to form the world from the original materials made by Chronos and Chthonia. "Zeus makes (Pherecydes goes on to say) a large and beautiful garment ; upon it he paints Earth and Ogenos (ocean), and the houses of Ogenos ; and he spreads the garment over a winged oak."t It is manifest, without attempting a complete explanation of these images, that the ideas and language of Pherecydes closely resembled those of the Orphic theologers, and that he ought rather to be classed with them than with the Ionic philosophers. § 4. Pherecydes lived in the age of the Seven Sages ; one of whom, Thales of Miletus, was the first in the series of the Ionic physical philosophers. The Seven Sages, as we have already had occasion to observe, were not solitary thinkers, whose renown for wisdom was acquired by speculations unintelligible to the mass of the people. Their fame, which extended over all Greece, was founded solely on their acts as statesmen, counsellors of the people in public affairs, and practical men. This is also true of Thales, whose sagacity in affairs of state and public economy appears from many anecdotes. In particular, Herodotus relates, that, at the time when the Ionians were threatened by the great Persian power of Cyrus, after the fall of Croesus, Thales, who was then very old, advised them to establish an Ionian capital in the middle of their coast, somewhere near Teos, where all the affairs of their race might be debated, and to which all the other Ionic cities might stand in the same relation as the Attic demi to Athens. At an earlier age, Thales is said to have foretold to the Ionians the total eclipse of the sun, which (either in G10 or G03 B.C.) separated the Medes from the Lydians in the battle which was fought by Cyaxares against Halyattes.J For this purpose, he doubt- less employed astronomical formula?, which he had obtained, through Asia Minor, from the Chaldeans, the fathers of Grecian, and indeed that Pherecydes was flayed as a punishment fur his atheism; a charge which was made against most of the early philosophers. •(• See Sturz Commentatio de Pherecyde utroque, in his Pherecydis Fragmenta, ed. alt. 1814. The genuineness of the fragments is especially proved by the rave ancient Ionic forms, cited from them by the learned grammarians, Apollonius and Herodian. I If Thales was (as is stated by Eusebius) bom in Olymp. 35. 2. u.c. G39, I12 was then either twenty-nine or thirty-six years old. a
 * Herod. V. 58. The expression %« probably gave rise to the fable